Piedmont
Piedmont is a ghost town in Piedmont, Wyoming. Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage. The archive files it under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Piedmont haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Piedmont, in Uinta County about ten miles southwest of Evanston, began as a Union Pacific support town in 1867 — a tent camp of tie cutters and a base for graders building the roadbed up the eight-mile Aspen Mountain grade. Moses Byrne, a Mormon pioneer entrepreneur, named the place for himself first; the name changed to Piedmont — 'foot of the mountains' — chosen, the marker record says, by the Byrne and Guild wives, sisters from Piedmont, Italy, to end confusion with the trackside town of Bryan.
The town industrialized around two commodities: water and wood for helper engines on the grade — depot, roundhouse, water tank, telegraph, post office, hotel, newspaper, saloons — and charcoal. Beginning about 1869 Byrne built beehive-shaped kilns, thirty feet across and thirty tall, that turned Uinta aspen and pine into charcoal for Utah smelters and Fort Bridger forges; the area's roughly thirty-five kilns pushed an estimated hundred thousand bushels a month in 1873.
Bypassed by tunnel
The end was a reroute: around 1901 Union Pacific opened the Aspen Tunnel a few miles north and pulled the line off the mountain, taking the helper-engine business — and then the charcoal and logging trade — with it. Piedmont dwindled for decades; the Guild Mercantile, its last store, closed in the 1940s.
Three of the kilns survive as a state historic site, National Register-listed in 1971, beside foundations and family cemeteries on county road. The legends are filed as legends: Butch Cassidy reportedly rendezvoused here before the 1896 Montpelier bank robbery — treasure seekers still dig — and Calamity Jane is said to have lived in Piedmont as a girl. No paranormal claim attaches.
Documented history
Union Pacific railroad resource town settled in 1867. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. The record appears in '8 Wyoming Ghost Towns You Need to Explore'. The date is part of the site's documented spine.
Media reportedWyoming Office of Tourism
Sources on file
- 018 Wyoming Ghost Towns You Need to ExploreWyoming Office of Tourism · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Pass 1 discovery. Inclusion is for ghost-town heritage; no haunting claim is implied. Parcel access and coordinates remain unverified.